A STONE IS MOST PRECIOUS WHERE IT BELONGS

A Uyghur journalist from East Turkestan recounts her family’s suffering at the hands of Chinese authorities.

In this moving, deeply personal account of a family’s collective anguish, Hoja, a reporter for Radio Free Asia, re-creates in intimate detail her life story within the tight Uyghur community and their ultimate persecution and imprisonment in “reeducation camps.” Once the thriving Uyghur capital of East Turkestan—designated by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—Ürümchi was gradually inundated in the early 1990s by the majority Han Chinese. CCP authorities sought to dilute the ethnic Uyghur population and “modernize” their cultural ways, which were deemed “backward” and “uncivilized.” The Han were favored for jobs and extraction of natural resources, leaving the Uyghurs impoverished and marginalized. Hoja came from a remarkable lineage of scholars and musicians, and her own passion for dance helped propel her to prominence in both school and cultural performances. Outspoken about the repressive tactics of the Chinese government, the author landed a job producing a children’s program at Xinjiang TV when she was 22. Regarding an early program she helped create, Hoja writes, “we hadn’t put in any political content, but at that point, in the mid-1990s, even existing as a Uyghur had begun to seem political….I was determined to counteract that as much as I could, while still remaining under the radar. After all, how much trouble could a children’s program cause?” Gradually, as the author shows, the Chinese authorities began heavily censoring content related to the Uyghur experience. While visiting her estranged husband in Vienna, Hoja applied to Radio Free Asia and began working to expose the ongoing Chinese suppression of the Uyghurs from the outside. The widespread effects on her family were devastating, but we are lucky to have this important historical record of what she—and so many others—endured.

A heartfelt, accessible story of a determined warrior for her oppressed people.